Page 40 of Friends to Lovers

chapter twenty-five

We spend a rushed rest of the afternoon restringing the twinkle lights and putting up the new ones, Ren continuing with bar setup while my mom places the centerpieces just so on the tables, everyone else spread around wherever Sasha positions them.

I barely make it to the last ten minutes of my shower slot before the rehearsal dinner, washing my hair and shaving my legs in record time. I dry my hair in front of the mirror in Stevie and Leo’s room, change into my cowl neck, terracotta slip dress, then nearly run into someone in the hall.

“Hey!” Sasha’s husband, Alex, has just arrived, bag over one shoulder. “Long time, no see!”

I hug him hello, start to ask how his flight was, when Sasha sticks her head out of their room, looking as close to frazzled as I’ve ever seen her, color rising in her cheeks and wavy hair wild.

It’s not the first time she’s seemed overwhelmed this weekend, and it strikes me as odd.

Sasha is usually so cool under pressure.

“Are you okay—” I ask, but she interrupts.

“You have twenty minutes to get ready!” she shouts, whether at Alex or me, I don’t know. We give each other a knowing look and head in our opposite directions.

When I step out onto the screen porch, Ren is just finishing buttoning up his shirt, the top two still undone.

I can smell the vaguely citrusy soap our moms always stock the house with from here, his hair slightly damp from his own shower.

There’s music playing from his phone, a Nick Drake song.

I shut the door behind me and drop my dirty clothes on my bed, turn to him.

“How’s your ankle?” he asks as I run my fingers over his collar.

I lift my foot, glance down at the new Band-Aid I put on. “Basically healed,” I say. I look back at him. “I had a very good doctor.”

He reaches into his back pocket. “I got you something.”

“You got me something?” I ask, trying to peer around him to see what it is. “Are we going to prom together?”

Ren rolls his eyes and smiles. “We did go to prom together.”

“Yeah, and you broke the heart of every eligible girl in the twelfth grade by going with your friend ,” I say.

It had seemed so obvious at the time; of course we’d go together.

Now it’s just another item on the list of signs I might have missed.

There were plenty of other girls Ren could have gone to prom with, and I could have probably mustered the courage to ask the guy who sat next to me in Government. We’ve always chosen each other.

“Am I not your friend now?” he asks, hand still tucked behind his back.

Of course you are , I want to say, but it’s more complicated than that. No matter how easy, natural, it’s felt this week, Ren hasn’t been just my friend for years now. I settle on, “I think you’re a little more than my friend.”

“I think so too,” he says, and my heart gives a light flutter. “Okay, close your eyes. Hold out your hand.”

“You’re not going to put a bug in my hand, are you?” I say, shutting my lids.

“Do you think I’ve just been carrying a grasshopper around in my back pocket, Joni?” he says, drawing a finger back and forth along the underside of my wrist.

“I don’t know.” I shift between my feet. “Despite all your innumerable amazing qualities, you’re still just a boy.”

“I promise you here and now that I will never put a bug in your hand, eyes open or closed.” He slips what feels like a small piece of paper into my palm, folding my fingers around it and placing his hand firmly over mine. “Ready?” he asks.

I open my eyes, smiling up at him before looking back down at the sticker in my hand. “You got me Fratty Chicken?”

“He’s yours to do with what you will,” Ren says.

It’s just a sticker, but it means much more: a reminder of a simpler, past version of us, a reminder that I’m still a part of this place, these traditions, even though I’ve stayed away these past few years. Ren understood how much I needed this.

I study the sticker again, transported back to the past, to me and Ren and Sasha and Thad and Stevie inserting our coins into that machine.

There are a lot of people who feel similarly attached to this chicken.

“How did you even get this?” I imagine him slinking into Thad’s room, stealing it while he was in the shower.

Ren looks a little chastened, teeth sinking into his lower lip before he admits, “I paid Thad a hundred bucks.”

“Ren, you spent a hundred dollars on a vending machine sticker for me?” I ask, not sure if I should be grateful or alarmed that he’d spend that much money on something like this.

Ren shrugs, mouth quirking toward a smile, and reaches for the sticker. “I can get you something better.”

“No,” I say, snatching it away and holding it behind my back. “You can’t have it. I love this sticker.”

“It’s okay if you don’t like it, Joni.” He grasps around me for it, tickling my sides, but I manage to sidestep him and thrust a hand out to keep him away.

“Tell me you know this is the perfect present,” I say. Suddenly, it seems like the most important thing in the world that he knows how much the gesture means to me.

“It’s just something dumb,” he says, head bowing slightly so that a lock of hair dances free. “Something to remember this week by.”

The mention that this week will end at all sends a small shock wave through me. I’m not ready to accept what that will mean, for my life or for me and Ren, for whatever we’ve just gotten back.

A smile plays across his face, his gaze drawing me into the past, to when things were so briefly good.

I swear I can smell it, that last time I was at Sublimity: beer and a faint hit of cold Pacific Northwest air as I walked through the door; the shoulder of Ren’s flannel under my nose, something woodsy and clean and so buried in my senses I could only ever identify it as home .

“I’m not coming back over there until you tell me it’s perfect,” I say now.

“It’s a perfect present,” he says quietly, like it’s important to him to say it too.

I walk back over, and he locks his arms around me. He knits his fingers into my hair, brushes his nose along the side of my nose, lips just hovering above my lips.

In that moment, I think I could tell him. That maybe I don’t want to talk about it later. Maybe I want to talk about it now . That I’ve spent two and a half years learning to be without him and realizing that I don’t want to be.

Maybe I could be that person, someone who can open up her mouth and confess all of that, rather than fantasizing about it.

But everything is so fragile, and Ren deserves someone who knows what the next day looks like, and I can’t risk holding on to this thing between us any tighter than I am right now.

I just got him back, and no number of kisses on the beach or hundred-dollar stickers can make this moment last longer than I wish it would.

* * *

“To Stevie and Leo!” my dad says, extending his wineglass toward the two long tables of guests.

We all echo my dad’s sentiment. The sun is just setting, sky a gray-blue above us as strung lights wink on.

I’m seated next to Stevie, who seems happy, cheeks rosy above her short, white dress with lacy bell sleeves that looks like something she plucked directly out of Penny Lane’s closet.

On her other side, Leo has been intently focused on our dad, guffawing at the bad jokes he sprinkled into his speech.

He cheers louder than anyone else before pulling Stevie into him, her face breaking into a huge smile before he kisses her.

After our dad has taken a seat again, Stevie turns to me, leaning in close. Leo’s arm is still around her, fingers playing absently at her hair, which hangs in waves down her back.

“I know something,” she tells me.

My brow knits together. “What something?”

“Something you’re not telling me,” she says, jabbing a finger against my shoulder.

She has to mean Ren. We’ve tried to be subtle, but she was already acting suspicious before anything happened between us.

I almost smile at the ridiculousness of her perception, but then she leans in closer.

“Something life-changing. Something you wouldn’t want anyone to know. ”

My heart seizes at that last line, you wouldn’t want anyone to know . I grab her hand to stop her. “Can I talk to you for a minute?” I say through a forced smile.

I pull her up from the table and guide her to the bar, smiling and nodding at Leo’s grandmother as we pass.

“Two reds, please,” I say to the bartender, just to have something to do with my hands.

Stevie gives me a smug look, arms crossed over her chest.

“Stevie,” I say. “What, exactly, do you think you know?”

She pouts. “I do know,” she says. “You just won’t tell me because you don’t really talk to me anymore.”

“Stevie,” I say, even though she’s right. After the rift opened between me and Ren, I became well-versed in only sharing surface level things, with Stevie, with my parents, retreating further into work and myself until ignoring what happened became second nature.

“No,” she says on a wobble. I can’t tell if it’s because she’s tipsy or about to cry, and my immediate reaction is to do anything to stop the latter, tell her anything she wants to know.

But she continues first. “Ever since Sasha’s wedding, you’re not talking to me like you used to.

” She sinks a hip against the bar. “I know you’re not happy, Joni.

I can tell. And I know it was you who changed the sheets. ”

I squint at her. “How—”

“Because you came up early,” she says. “You don’t listen to soundscapes. You should have been at work. It was the middle of the day on a Monday. Why—”